On Sun, 20 Aug 2000, wmy wrote: > Dear Prof. Stevan Harnad, > > I am a young editor of the Publishing House of the Chinese Medical > Association. I am writing a paper on electronic preprint, but I cannot > find a paper systematically introducing the origin and development of > electronic preprint. > > I know you are a well-know expert in this field, so could I ask you a > question. My question is: When, if possible, who first put forward the > idea of electronic preprint? And if convenient, could you please provide > me with some related references. > > Any help from you will be appreciated. > > Best regards, > > Mouyue Wang > Publishing House > Chinese Medical Association > Email:[email protected]
Dear Mouyue Wang, The idea of a "preprint" comes from the paper era, and it refers to a paper copy of an article that has not yet been refereed or accepted for publication. Scholars and scientists have been sharing paper preprints with one another before publication for decades, especially in Physics. And it was in Physics that the idea of the "electronic preprint" was born, or at least reached discipline-wide scale: It started in 1991 as an email version of the preprint, sent to a specific mailing list of high energy physicists; then it quickly evolved into a Web version, archived in http://xxx.lanl.gov at Los Alamos for everyone who might be interested. (The founder founder of both these systems was Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos). Ginsparg, P. (1994) First Steps Towards Electronic Research Communication. Computers in Physics. (August, American Institute of Physics). 8(4): 390-396. http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/ In parallel, authors in all disciplines, from the 1980's onward, began to archive their paper "tech reports" (= preprints) on-line, and often also the final drafts of their papers, first, on their individual, departmental, or institutional FTP sites, and then, with the advent of the web, on their websites. And the phenomenon evolved further. First of all, even in the Los Alamos Physics "Preprint" Archive, the papers were never only preprints for long. After the pre-publication paper was refereed, revised, and accepted, authors would either archive that final draft too (as a "postprint," as I have called it) or they would at least add to the preprint file the full citation for the accepted journal version (presumably because the changes between the preprint and the postprint were minor). See: Harnad, S. & Carr, L. (2000) Integrating, Navigating and Analyzing Eprint Archives Through Open Citation Linking (the OpCit Project). Current Science (special issue honour of Eugene Garfield) (in press) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad00.citation.htm (and references cited/linked therein). So it is highly misleading to keep speaking of "electronic PREprints." This is the reason that the Open Archive initiative (http://www.openarchives.org) has been re-named as such (in place of its older name "UPS: Universal Preprint Service") -- because it is NOT just for electronic PREprints, but also for electronic POSTprints. Hence electronic (preprints + postprints) = "eprints". I am not really sure who first coined the term "eprints." (Perhaps it was also Paul Ginsparg.) I recommend using that word, in place of "electronic preprints," which incorrectly leaves out "electronic postprints." See: http://www.eprints.org Some other papers on the topic: Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html Odlyzko, A.M. (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (formerly International Journal of Man-Machine Studies), 42 (1995), 71-122. http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/tragic.loss.txt Okerson A. & O'Donnell, J. (Eds.) (1995) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads; A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC., Association of Research Libraries, June 1995. http://www.arl.org/sc/subversive/ Sincerely, Stevan Harnad -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad [email protected] Professor of Cognitive Science [email protected] Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of this ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: [email protected]
